PERSPECTIVE ON NORTH KOREA : Creating a Nuclear Straw Man : There’s no real evidence of a threat except in the eyes of a Pentagon needing to justify its two-war budget.

North Korea, lost for years in the back pages of newspapers and absent entirely from TV news, has re-emerged as headline material.

Always a hard case, certainly no friend of America, North Korea has quietly been disintegrating economically for decades while South Korea has become a powerful economic, political and military force in Northeast Asia. Now, with twice the population and 10 times the productive output of its neighbor, South Korea seems well situated to deal with any military threat it might perceive from North Korea.

In 1989, Pentagon representatives testified in Congress that “South Korean forces are capable of defending themselves against any threat from the North that does not involve either the Soviet Union or the Peoples’ Republic of China.” Since then, North Korea has made no significant change in its military forces or weapons and has cut its military spending in half ($4.1 billion to $2.2 billion). During the same period, South Korea has upgraded its forces qualitatively and increased defense spending almost 50% ($8.5 billion to $12.1 billion).

It is difficult to explain how South Korea is more vulnerable now when it is outspending North Korea by a 6-1 margin and enjoys marked superiority in the quality of its military equipment, technology, mobility and support.

For this reason, Pentagon officials have been forced to highlight the North Korean nuclear program as a “new danger” in order to justify the official expressions of alarm now dominating the news. Secretary of Defense William J. Perry has issued a series of dramatic assessments of the growing nuclear threat from North Korea. On Easter Sunday, speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” he raised the stakes by establishing a six-month time limit for North Korea to satisfy U.S. demands that it freeze its nuclear program. This is diplomacy by ultimatum, a notoriously unsuccessful negotiating technique when dealing with authoritarian leaders.

And what motivates the ultimatum? Just what great danger lurks north of the DMZ? According to Perry, North Korea may now have enough plutonium to build one or two nuclear explosive devices. That estimate is far from certain because it rests on the assumption that the North Koreans refueled their 5-megawatt reactor in 1989. If not, they do not have enough plutonium to make a firecracker.

Even if North Korea did refuel, further assumptions must be validated to postulate a nuclear threat: that North Korea has a reprocessing capability efficient enough to produce up to 15 kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium from the spent reactor fuel; that it has been able to fashion a reliable “trigger” to produce a significant explosion, and that it has been able to package their design in a configuration small enough for use as a deliverable weapon.

Unless all three assumptions are true, North Korea’s nuclear program has little military significance, because possessing one or two explosive devices is a far cry from the ability to employ nuclear weapons for military purposes.

The tenuous proposition that we face a growing North Korean nuclear threat was weakened last December by then-Secretary of Defense Les Aspin. “Whatever happened in 1989, the situation is not deteriorating now.” Aspin said. “They are not developing more plutonium to make more nuclear bombs.”

Because it is really impossible to describe a credible current threat, Perry has now resorted to pointing with alarm at a hypothetical threat that will exist “two or three years from now (when) they’re producing bombs at the rate of a dozen a year,” a conclusion supported by arguable assumptions.

Perhaps this would ring truer if North Korea’s neighbors were seeing the same threat. Unfortunately for our diplomacy, Russia, China, South Korea and Japan are not alarmed and are utterly unwilling to support U.S. ultimatums and demands for sanctions. These are the very nations at risk (as America is not), if North Korea can produce deliverable nuclear weapons. In truth, China and South Korea are far more concerned about Japan building up a huge stock of plutonium than they are about Kim Il Sung’s meager nuclear effort.

All of the evidence suggests that American citizens are being subjected to a well-orchestrated Pentagon campaign to restore North Korea to enemy status. In order to justify a budget based on their current two-war strategy, our military needs two enemies. Because North Korea spends less than 1% of what we spend for military forces, it makes a satisfactory enemy only if the specter of nuclear weapons is raised as a scare tactic. The great danger in promoting this ominous image of nuclear danger is that our words and actions may create a military crisis where none exists, an outcome which could have tragic consequences.